John H. Coatsworth is Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin
American Affairs. Coatsworth's most recent book is The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, a two-volume
reference work, edited with Victor Bulmer-Thomas and Roberto Cortes Conde.

In the
slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the U.S. government has
intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America a total of at
least 41 times. That amounts to once every 28 months for an
entire century (see table).

Direct
intervention occurred in 17 of the 41 cases. These incidents
involved the use of U.S. military forces, intelligence agents or local citizens
employed by U.S. government agencies. In another 24 cases, the U.S. government
played an indirect role. That is, local actors played the principal roles, but
either would not have acted or would not have succeeded without encouragement
from the U.S. government.

While direct interventions are easily identified and
copiously documented, identifying indirect interventions requires an exercise
in historical judgment. The list of 41 includes only cases where, in the
author’s judgment, the incumbent government would likely have survived in the
absence of U.S. hostility. The list ranges from obvious cases to close calls.
An example of an obvious case is the decision, made in the Oval Office in
January 1963, to incite the Guatemalan army to overthrow the (dubiously)
elected government of Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes in order to prevent an open
competitive election that might have been won by left-leaning former President
Juan José Arévalo. A less obvious case is that of the Chilean military coup
against the government of President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. The
Allende government had plenty of domestic opponents eager to see it deposed. It
is included in this list because U.S. opposition to a coup (rather than
encouragement) would most likely have enabled Allende to continue in office
until new elections.

The 41 cases do not include incidents in which the United
States sought to depose a Latin American government, but failed in the attempt.
The most famous such case was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961.
Also absent from the list are numerous cases in which the U.S. government acted
decisively to forestall a coup d’etat or otherwise protect an incumbent regime
from being overthrown.

Overthrowing governments in Latin America has never been
exactly routine for the United States. However, the option to depose a sitting
government has appeared on the U.S. president’s desk with remarkable frequency
over the past century. It is no doubt still there, though the frequency with
which the U.S. president has used this option has fallen rapidly since the end
of the Cold War...

After deposing Evo Morales in a
U.S.-backed coup November 11, Bolivia’s military selected Jeanine Añez as
president. Añez immediately signed a decree pre-exonerating security forces of
all crimes during their “re-establishment of order,” understood by all sides as
a license to kill. Those same forces have now conducted massacres of Morales
supporters near the cities […]

Disappearances, murders, arbitrary
detentions, rapes, torture and hospitals that refuse to take care of those
wounded by the repression were some of the events recorded during the first day
of work. They were held and kicked at the airport by a pro-coup mob. Then the
Minister of Government of Añez, Arturo Murillo, came out to […]

Economists and statisticians
have pointed out that the trends displayed during the results are quite
common across the world. They have also condemned the OAS, the U.S.
government and the media for repeating this lie.

A coup on November 10 removed
the socialist government of Bolivian President Evo Morales. The trail of
evidence—from money flows to U.S. influence within the Bolivian military,
and U.S. control of the Organization of American States (OAS)—leaves little
doubt that the U.S. government made preparations and orchestrated the final
stages of the coup.

On Tuesday, the Center for Constitutional
Rights attorneys and co-counsel represented Indigenous Bolivian family
members in urging the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate a
judgement against Bolivia’s former president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada
(Goni), and former defense minister, Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, for their role
in the massacre of unarmed Indigenous civilians in 2003 in the period that
has come to be known as “Black October.” Thank you for standing by
our side so we could continue this 16 year-long fight for justice!

A U.S. jury had found the two former officials liable under
the Torture Victim Protection Act in April 2018 and awarded the eight
victims’ families $10 million in damages. The unanimous verdict came after
a month-long trial that included six days of deliberations. The judge later
took the extraordinary step to set aside the jury verdict and entered his
own ruling holding the defendants not liable. Thanks to you, we
fought against these high-level officials to demand accountability, for the
Indigenous Bolivian families who lost their loved ones as a result of this
horrific violence -- and will continue to do so to the very end!

“I was proud, during the trial, to be able to hold these two
men to account in their adopted country,” said Teófilo Baltazar Cerro, a
plaintiff whose pregnant wife Teodosia was shot and killed while
praying inside her sister’s home. “We have faith that the Court of Appeals
will see what the Bolivian people and the American jury also saw: that Goni
and Sánchez Berzaín are responsible for these killings, and that justice
must be done.”

Your partnership gives us the confidence to boldly fight against abuses
of power and stand with vulnerable communities who are targeted by these
abuses. For more information, visit our case page.

In gratitude and solidarity,

Vince Warren
Executive Director

P.S. For those of you in the New York area,
please join us tomorrow at 6 p.m. for Black October's Legacy:
Fighting Impunity with the Aymara Community of Bolivia. This is a
unique opportunity to hear from one of the families who brought this case,
as they share their story, including what happened to their daughter, how
they have fought for justice in the years since, and the significance of
their fight to hold “Goni” accountable. Learn more and RSVP here.

The Center for
Constitutional Rights stands with social justice movements and communities
under threat—fusing litigation, advocacy, and narrative shifting to
dismantle systems of oppression regardless of the risk.

In case you missed it,
40/29 News covered our protest of the U.S.-backed coup in Bolivia. We are
not only reaching the dozens or hundreds of cars that drive by, but when we get
news coverage we are speaking to tens of thousands of people. This is why
even small protests are so important. This is especially important on
this issue of the Bolivian coup, where most of the political and media
establishment are not even admitting that it was a coup. Thanks again to
everyone that showed up in the cold and on such short notice!

Veterans For Peace strongly condemns
the violent U.S.-backed right-wing coup in Bolivia. Evo Morales was
the first Indigenous president in Bolivia, which is 65% Indigenous.
The openly racist Bolivarian oligarchy, descendants of European
colonizers, could not stand to see a government that was led by
Indigenous people and whose policies were lifting millions of people
out of poverty.

The U.S. government tries to hide
its involvement in Latin American coups, but we know that the U.S.
and the CIA have a long history of interfering in Latin America , and
USAID has "invested more than $97 million in
"decentralization" and "regional autonomy"
projects and opposition political parties in Bolivia since
2002". Several of the coup generals were trained at the infamous
School of the Americas (aka School of Assassins) at Fort Benning,
Georgia.

Veterans For Peace stands in
solidarity with the Indigenous majority in Bolivia who are resisting
the racist, right-wing takeover of their democracy. We demand that
the coup be stopped and democracy restored in Bolivia. As military
veterans who have been used and abused in too many unjust wars, we
demand an end to 200 years of U.S. intervention in Latin America.

Janine Jackson:When a president announces his involuntary resignation—after
weeks of law enforcement mutiny backed by armed forces and the public
urging of military commanders—the way to convey that is not to say that
the president “stepped down,” “left office” or had an “abrupt departure.”
Yet that is what elite US media are telling the public about events in Bolivia,
where Evo Morales, the country's first indigenous president, was forced
out of office after weeks of protests around supposed irregularities in
the most recent election.

The magazine Foreign Policystated, “It’s not a coup in any sense of the
word, and Bolivia and Latin America have experience with actual coups.”
Although not enough, apparently; just last year, Foreign Policy ran
a piece headlined, “It’s Time for a Coup in
Venezuela.”

After Morales and the vice president,
other officials—citing threats to their families—stepped down in
succession, and now, as we record on November 14, a second vice president
of the senate, Jeanine Áñez, has declared herself president—with a Bible no less—and the State
Department says they are looking forward to working
with her.

Events in Bolivia are in flux. Here to
ground us a little is Alex Main, director of international policy at
the Center for Economic and
Policy Research. He joins us by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Alex
Main.

Alex Main: Thank you, Janine; it's good to be back.

JJ: Definitions do matter, but setting that
aside for the moment, what comes through clearly in US media coverage is
the idea that Evo Morales was so unpopular after 14 years in office, so
deeply unliked, that he had to jigger the constitution to try and stay in office. I wanted
to ask you, first, just to talk a little bit about Morales’ tenure to
date, and actual public opinion in Bolivia.

AM: Well, sure. I think the polls in the country gave a pretty good
idea of his popularity. And, in fact, what's interesting in terms of the
media coverage is that you saw a real shift, where some of the initial coverage—you can look at the Washington
Post, for instance, just before the elections took place—were
pretty much announcing that this is a done deal, that Evo Morales is most
likely going to win these elections, quite possibly in the first round of
the elections that took place on October 20.

And, of course, there's a good explanation
for that: The economy of Bolivia is doing really well,
particularly compared to other economies of Latin America. And Evo
Morales’ policies over the 13 years that he's been president have
been very successful in reducing poverty, in reducing
inequality, in improving infrastructure throughout the country.

Now, of course, there is a strong
opposition. But that opposition, in the last few elections, has failed to overturn him, get him out of the presidency,
or really manage to have a significant opposition even within the
congress of the country. So the polls that came out give us a good sense
of where Evo Morales stands in terms of public opinion. But then the
media narrative shifted quite dramatically in the following days.

JJ: Yeah, and now the line, strange as it is,
seems to be that, “Well, it wasn't a coup, but even if it was, that's OK,
because there were serious irregularities in the election,” as if that
would somehow justify a coup.

But I wonder if you can talk us through
what people are reading were the groundings for this widespread protest
and for the military intervention, which is that somehow Morales or his
people fiddled with this most recent election. What
can you tell us, including from CEPR’s work, we should know about that?

Alex Main: "The Organization of
American States and much
of the major media misled public opinion as to what was happening with
these elections."

AM: I think what you need to know is that there
are two groups that didn't do their job around this, in terms of really
informing public opinion.

The first group was the Organization of American
States,
that was down in Bolivia observing these elections, and that produced
a communiqué the day after the elections, in
which they said that there had been a “drastic change in the trend” in
the electronic vote count, the quick count that was taking place, and
that it was unexplainable that there had been such a drastic shift in the
trend.

This particular statement was very easy to
debunk. You didn't really need a think tank like ours to do that; I think
anyone who really looked at the election results carefully could do it.
You could see that there wasn't a drastic shift in the results, and that
also the shifts that you saw towards the end of the election, which the
OAS was referring to—and there was a progressive shift in favor of Evo Morales that widened
his margin—he had originally had, I think, 83% of the quick vote count,
about 7 points ahead of the closest contender, Carlos Mesa, and
gradually, with the remaining votes that came in, the margin increased to
over 10 points, which was what was needed for Evo Morales to win in the
first round.

And that was entirely explainable. In
fact, it's what we saw in previous elections; it's pure geography: The areas of the country that reported
the results last were the areas of the country that happened to be
poorer, more remote, and much, much more favorable, traditionally, to Evo
Morales. So it was quite normal that the margin shifted in his favor. So
this was a really misleading statement that had absolutely no basis, that
came from the OAS.

And then that had a huge influence on the
second group that I would say misled public opinion, and that's, of
course, the media, the mainstream media, that took these statements from
the OAS at face value, and ran with them, didn't even try to form any kind of
assessment of their own as to the value of these statements, and did two
things: one, gave these statements complete credit. We and other folks,
independent statisticians, were pointing out that these statements made
no sense; they didn't take that into consideration at all. The OAS is the
voice of authority and they left it at that. Secondly, the media decided
that references to what was the electronic vote count, quick vote count—which was not the official vote
count of the election—was the same thing as the official vote count.

So there was this sort of confusion (I
think some of the media was genuinely confused); they focused on the fact that there had
been an “interruption” in the reporting of the quick vote count, which,
by the way, was something that had been anticipated to begin with. They
pointed to that and said, “OK, well, then that means that the integrity
of the vote count is in question,” when, of course, the
official vote count that had been occurring—and that’s a much more
lengthy and meticulous count, and took place over four days—was never
interrupted. And there was never anything from the Organization of
American States or anybody else that suggested that there was really a
problem with that vote count process.

So again, the Organization of American
States and much of the major media misled public opinion
as to what was happening with these elections, and created this belief
that there had been severe irregularities in the vote count. And that,
gradually, in terms of the media coverage, became something portrayed as fraud and stolen elections, even
though there's no evidence pointing to that at all.

JJ: Well, but if you tell people who are
unhappy with an election outcome, “Well, that was due to fraud,” you're
bound to get a response, particularly if you are a powerful entity like
the United States, like the OAS, saying, “Yeah, you shouldn't accept that
result.”

So now we get protests in Bolivia. And how would you
describe those initial protests, and take us through the timeline in
between the start of those protests and Morales’ “resignation”?

AM: What happened with these protests is that
they were by and large in urban areas, they were largely middle-class
protests. They definitely grew after October 21, and, I would say, after
the misleading statements from the Organization of American States came
out. This legitimized discourse from the opposition, which was that these
elections were fraudulent, and that really galvanized the protest movement, and it turned
violent. Some of that violence was oriented towards the voting centers,
and the voting authority, and there were voting centers that ended up
damaged, ransacked. Voting material, including ballots, were destroyed,
which, of course, made it more difficult to audit the elections
afterwards.

And there was also violence directed at
supporters and leaders of the Movement Toward Socialism or MAS, Evo
Morales’ political party, and towards indigenous people writ large. So
there was also a racist element to these protests.

They grew more and more out of hand, and
then you had police mutinies that were staged, I would say,
Thursday, Friday, Saturday of last week, in which the police forces in
some of the biggest cities in Bolivia, including Cochabamba and La Paz,
declared themselves in mutiny, and refused to intervene against any of
the violent protests that were taking place. Of course, this opened the
door to more chaos. And then what really sealed the deal was the fact
that the military then came out, the high command of the military, said
that they would not intervene against the police. So at that
point, you had a complete breakdown, I would say, in law enforcement in
the country, and particularly in terms of dealing with the more violent
elements of these protests.

And, finally, you had the high command of
the military that called on Evo Morales to resign. Of course,
that's when we really could see that a coup was taking place. And shortly
afterwards, Evo Morales and the vice president of the country, Álvaro
García Linera, announced that they were resigning. In their
announcement, they also made very clear that a coup was occurring. Afterwards, they went
into hiding, and the next day managed to get on a plane, with some difficulty, but managed to get on a plane to Mexico,
where they were offered asylum, and where they are now
located, whereas some of the other leadership from the MAS party was
holed up in the Mexican embassy and also offered asylum.

So very much a military coup, reminiscent
in some ways of the coup in Honduras in June of 2009, a
military coup where the president was taken out of the country, the
democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya. And, similar to back
then, even though everyone, I think, at this point is clear that there
was a coup in Honduras in June of 2009, back then you also had this sort
of debate in the media as to whether or not it was a coup.

And I think in part it had to do with
the ambivalent position of, at that time, the Obama
administration. And now we're seeing, of course, from the Trump
administration, a position that's not even ambivalent, that's fully supportive of the coup that's occurred. Of
course, they're not calling it a coup. And I think that sets the frame
for a lot of the media coverage, which is also failing to call it a coup,
and in some cases, such as the New York Times, in an editorial that was published just three days
ago, celebrating what has happened in Bolivia as a step forward for
democracy.

JJ: I wanted to ask you about the US role.
How would the United States feel about an economically
successful Latin American country run by an indigenous man and a
party called the Movement Towards Socialism? What
has been the US role with regard to the Morales administration, and then
with regard to this coup?

AM: The relations between the two
countries—between the two governments, I should say—have been very bad
for quite a long time, and this stemmed from the US, through its
diplomats, and particularly through its ambassador that was in Bolivia at
the time in 2008, supporting violent protests. Again, this took place in
August-September of 2008, when you had the ambassador who met with some of the hardline protest
leaders that were encouraging protests that were also very racist, and
going after indigenous peoples and MAS leaders and so on. This led to a
break in diplomatic relations. The US ambassador was kicked out of Bolivia and, of course, the US
reciprocated. They haven't had ambassador-level relations since then.

And, of course, in terms of its own
domestic and foreign policies, Bolivia has really gone in a different
direction from that that the US government has wanted to see. And they
did away with US assistance to not be reliant on that. So US AID ended up leaving the country, at the request of the
Evo Morales government. And then, of course, Evo Morales was close to Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and
other left-wing leaders in the region.

And so I think, whether under the George
W. Bush administration or the Obama administration, the US government
really saw the Bolivian government of Evo Morales as an adversary in the
region, and sought to undermine Evo Morales, probably not as actively as
the government in Venezuela but still, I think, fairly actively,
certainly in multilateral settings.

But what's happened with these last
elections is that you've had the Organization of American States that’s
there observing. They've observed elections in Bolivia before; there were
no real issues. But I think there was a sense of an opportunity now
with these elections, and the fact that there was some controversy around
the elections, due to the fact that Evo Morales was standing for another
term. And the constitution allowed him two terms; he was standing for a
third term under this constitution. Of course, that had been authorized
and was legal because of a court decision. But, ultimately, you had a sector of the
population that was riled up about that. And that was part of what was
behind the protest movement.

So you already had a context of some
social tension that was there, that the US took advantage of, and they
did that in large part through the Organization of American States. And you
saw a great deal of coordination between the Organization of American
States’ electoral mission and statements and the statements of the
secretary general of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro,
and the statements and positions coming from the State Department and the
White House throughout this whole episode, which shifted from “There
needs to be a runoff election” to “There need to be completely new
elections” to supporting the forced resignation, under military pressure,
of Evo Morales, to supporting a coup.

So you had both the US and the
Organization of American States that were very much in line and, of
course, the US has an enormous influence within the Organization of
American States and provides something like 60% of its funding, not to
mention that the Organization of American States is located in the middle
of Washington, DC, just next to the US State Department.

JJ: And that brings us up to now, where we
have protests by indigenous people against the coup in Bolivia, and also,
as you noted, attacks on MAS representatives and serious unrest.

And we have also Jeanine Áñez, who was a
lower-level official, now saying, “I'm the president now.” And the Associated
Press has a headline saying, “Bolivia’s Declared Interim President
Faces challenges,” not noting that [she's] declared by
herself, you know, and we're hearing from the State Department, which
just got through supporting the coup, has a statement, at least from one
official, saying, “We look forward to working with Jeanine
Áñez.” Is that legal? Now we have someone stepping forward, it sounds a
lot like Venezuela, someone saying, “Oh, you know what, call me president
now.”

AM: No, it's absolutely not legal. So you
could consider that as sort of the second part of the coup, the first
part being the forced resignation, under military pressure, of the
president and vice president, and also other officials that were in the
constitutional succession to be president. They were all under threat.
They were being threatened personally, or their families were being
threatened, and then they either left the country or went into hiding.
But at any rate, that was a military coup right there. And then, when you
had Jeanine Áñez, who stepped up in the senate and declared herself
president, that was also a coup.

You had, of course, in the constitutional
line of succession, the president of the senate, that would have
eventually become president. However, she, Jeanine Áñez, was not the
president of the senate; she belonged to the minority opposition party in
the senate. And she took advantage of the fact that the legislators of
both houses were not there, were in hiding, weren't able to assist in the
discussion, so there was no quorum. So she spoke before a plenary that
wasn't a quorum. I was not legal; you didn't have enough members of the
senate that were present. And declared herself president of the senate,
before then saying, “OK, if I'm president of the senate, then that makes
me president of the country.”

And I think what really made it clear what
this was all about was when you had the military high command, one of the
officers in the military high command, who was the one who put the
presidential sash around the body of Jeanine Áñez, in place, of course,
of the outgoing president.

Those are the sorts of things that the
media have not described in what's happened: the very unconstitutional
nature of this presidential succession. Most of the articles that we're
seeing now coming from most of the media are just describing Jeanine Áñez as the interim
president, period, and not even mentioning the fact that there might be
some debate as to her legitimacy as an interim president.

JJ: Even when US media talk about what's going
on, the words they use to emphatically say—for example, Foreign
Policy, which said, this isn’t a coup by any understanding
of it. Their subhead on their article that called for a coup in
Venezuela said, “Only nationalists in the military can
restore a legitimate constitutional democracy.” Now, that's them talking
about Venezuela, but it's an indication that words don't mean what you
might think they mean when you're reading US media's foreign policy
coverage, you know? It's just kind of a topsy-turvy world in elite US
media, when we're trying to understand what's going on in Latin America,
certainly.

AM: Yeah, that's right. And it's, again, very
reminiscent of Honduras in 2009. At that time, you had a lot of the media
commentators that were pointing out that Manuel Zelaya had been trying
to change the constitution, supposedly because he wanted to stay
president indefinitely, and so on. And so then saying, “Well, then, it
wasn't really a coup.” And you're seeing something similar now because of
this debate over Evo Morales’s re-election, which, again, was legal,
which was approved by the courts, but they're using that debate to say,
“Well, you know, it wasn't even really legitimate for him to be running
in these elections,” leaving aside the fact that he was most certainly
still the president of the country until January 20, until the end of his
term, and that he’d been forcibly removed from office.

And I think we're going to have a similar
situation where today, no one really questions the fact that there was a
coup in Honduras. I think, weeks, months, maybe years from now, it'll be
clear to everyone that there was a coup in Bolivia, but by then, it will
be too late. Public opinion will have only been awoken long after the
coup has occurred, and people will not be mobilizing, I think, as they
should, to put pressure on the US government, on the US Congress and so
on, to do the right thing, and to denounce and work to undo the coup
that’s just occurred in Bolivia.

JJ: We've
been speaking with Alex Main. He's the director of international policy
at the Center for Economic and
Policy Research. Their work on Bolivia and on other issues is online
at cepr.net. Alex Main, thank you so much for joining
us this week on CounterSpin.

The Veterans of About Face vehemently and
unequivocally condemn the U.S. role in facilitating and supporting
the coup d’état of the democratically elected Bolivian Socialist
President Evo Morales. President Morales was ousted on November 11 by
the Bolivian military and its right-wing mob of reactionaries and
Christian fascist paramilitaries who terrorized supporters,
government ministers, and elected officials. We support the
self-determination of the Bolivian people who are filling the streets
to demand the restoration of the constitutional order and to return
democratically elected President Evo Morales to office.

As of this statement, Morales’ supporters -- who
are coming from the rural areas to the cities to protest and show
their support -- are being met with military and police repression,
as well as with right-wing violence. Long considered the poorest
country in South America, Bolivia is an indigenous majority country
with a minority European descendant population who control most of
the country’s wealth. Evo Morales is the country’s first Indigenous
president in 480 years. While in the past, Bolivia's government has
marginalized poor and Indigenous peoples and ruled on behalf of the
wealthier white elites and foreign corporate interests, Morales’
strong support base lies with the Indigenous communities who for the
first time have a leader who looks like them and truly represents
their concerns. Under Morales’s leadership, the country recovered its
sovereignty from corporate entities, experienced an upsurge in
economic growth and equity, and saw social and ecological advances.
As a result, Bolivians have seen a higher standard of living- lifting
40 percent out of poverty, and 60 percent out of extreme poverty. We
have no doubt that it is for exactly these reasons that the United
States government, heavily influenced by corporate influence, is
comfortable with, if not supportive of, this gross violation of
democratic values.

We call on the global community to reject this
affront to democracy and the farcical “interim presidency” of Jeanine
Añez who proclaimed herself president. It is shameful that the White
House so quickly legitimized the coup and recognized the coup
government. Meanwhile, Democrats continue to give their consent by
remaining silent. This is completely unacceptable.

Furthermore, we demand that U.S. elected
officials, particularly Senator Marco Rubio (R- FL), Senator Ted Cruz
(R-TX), and Congressman Robert “Bob” Menendez (D- NJ), come clean
about any participation in the removal of Morales. Coup plotters
themselves claim in leaked audio to
have had conversations with these three U.S. officials and to have
gotten their support.

This is not the first time that Sen. Marco Rubio
has involved himself in the destabilization of a Latin American
country. The Senator has made several attempts to help push forward
the overthrow of the government in Caracas, and at each failure, he
continues to push for harsher US sanctions intended to cause economic
collapse. He also pushes for crushing sanctions against Cuba and
Nicaragua, which cause undue harm to everyday people rather than
those in power. We urge the constituents of these three elected
officials to demand answers and hold them accountable.

As Veterans who have witnessed the fallouts of
U.S. policies abroad personally, we know that this support for
violent coups comes with no regard for the consequences -- often
leading to wars, atrocities, unnecessary deaths, and mass migrations.
Despite what Trump and other politicians may claim, we understand
that they have no true concern for the people or for any of the
people’s grievances against the leaders the US targets -- instead,
this moment fits into a long US history of overthrowing democracies
in favor of right-wing regimes willing to align themselves to the US
government and corporate interests. We believe in the
self-determination of the people, free from US interference that will
serve only to make violence and tensions worse.

1.Demand
an investigation into the role that the US played in the Bolivian
coup, specifically the roll that played Senator Marco Rubio (R- FL),
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Congressman Robert “Bob” Menéndez (D-
NJ)

2.Demand
that the constitutional order be restored.

3.Demand
that the Democratic candidates denounce the coup and call out
President Trump's overreach in international affairs and the affairs
of Bolivia.

The nationalization efforts
of Evo Morales ensured that the State controlled 51 percent of all
private energy firms that operated in Bolivia, which allowed the
State’s coffers to fill rapidly. It was this money that was invested to
go after poverty, hunger, and illiteracy.

Bolivian coup leader Luis
Fernando Camacho is a far-right multi-millionaire who arose from
fascist movements in the Santa Cruz region, where the US has encouraged
separatism. He has courted support from Colombia, Brazil, and the
Venezuelan opposition.

The Bolivian people are living
through terrible moments, with police officers and motorcyclists storm the
streets and the military high command deciding to attack the citizens as a
means of pacification, including preventing prominent people, religious leaders
and political leaders from finding constitutional and democratic solutions to
the crisis we are facing.

As Lula Emerges From Prison, US Media
Ignore How Washington Helped Put Him There

The
Brazilian Supreme Court reversed a 2018 ruling on November 7, upholding the
principle of innocent until proven guilty in the 1988 Constitution and
declaring it illegal to jail defendants before their appeals processes have
been exhausted. Within 24 hours, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was
released to an adoring crowd of hundreds of union members and social movement
activists who had maintained a camp outside the police station where he was
held, shouting “good morning,” “good afternoon” and “good night” to him for 580
consecutive days.

The New York Times (8/25/17)
depicted Judge Sérgio Moro as “the face of the national reckoning for Brazil’s
ruling class.” He now heads the Justice Department in the fascist government of
Jair Bolsonaro.

The
Supreme Court had previously ruled, on April 5, 2018—after
a threat from Brazilian Gen. Eduardo Villas Bôas—that defendants
could be preemptively jailed before their appeals processes played out.
Directly afterwards, Judge Sérgio Moro pressed for an immediate election-year
arrest warrant for the PT party founder at a moment when he was widely leading
in all polls. (The far-right candidate who won in the wake of Lula’s removal
from the race, Jair Bolsonaro, went on to name Moro his “Super Justice
Minister.”)

Lula’s
arrest came as part of a wide-ranging international investigation, ostensibly
aimed at corruption, called Lava Jato (“Car Wash”), which
involved the US Justice Department, US Security and Exchange Commission and Swiss
federal police, working with Judge Moro and a public prosecutor team based in
the conservative Brazilian city of Curitiba (CounterSpin, 6/21/19).
The only charge that prosecutors had been able to stick on Lula was that he had
committed “indeterminate acts of corruption.”

At
the time, the Anglo media ignored US involvement in the investigation, built
Moro up as a superhero, and failed to provide any kind of critical
analysis of the proceedings against Lula, despite complaints from
some of the world’s leading legal scholars and human rights
activists that the former president was victim of a politically motivated
kangaroo court proceeding designed to remove him from the presidential
elections.

There
was no material evidence linking Lula to any crime. His conviction was based
on coerced plea bargain testimony by a single convicted criminal
named Leo Pinheiro, director of the OAS construction company, which built the
building where an apartment that featured in Lula’s case was located. Sentenced
to ten years and eight months for paying bribes to Petrobras Petroleum company,
Pinheiro originally testified that Lula had not committed any crime,
then changed his story twice, implicating Lula before having his sentence
reduced to two years and six months. His third and final story stated that Lula
had received free renovations on the beach-side apartment in exchange for
political favors.

Seventy-three
witnesses, including executives from the OAS company, testified that neither
Lula nor anyone from his family had ever owned or lived in the apartment.
Furthermore, a judge in Brasilia determined in January 2018, as part of a
different case, that the vacant apartment still belonged to OAS. The
prosecutors were unable to prove that the renovations had ever actually taken place.
Although Sérgio Moro had barred the press from visiting the site, the MTST
housing movement broke in and filmed a video which proved that,
contrary to prosecutors claims, the strikingly cheap-looking apartment had
never had any of the renovations listed by the prosecutors, including
installation of a private elevator and luxury appliances. The Lava Jato
task force prosecutors and Judge Moro were unable to prove that they
had any legal jurisdiction over a case involving an alleged crime in a
different state, São Paulo, which has its own court system, after they dropped
an initial frivolous charge alleging a connection between the apartment
renovations and a money-laundering scheme involving the Petrobras petroleum
company. Finally, the alleged renovations, which prosecutors were unable to
prove ever took place, in an apartment that they were unable to prove belonged
to Lula, supposedly happened three years after he left public office,
meaning that it was legally impossible to prove abuse of authority.

“Brazilians call him SuperMoro, chanting his
name on the streets of Rio de Janeiro as if he were a soccer star,” Time‘s
Bryan Walsh (4/21/16) reported.

When
Moro, who was declared a Time personality of the year in 2016
(4/21/16), declared Lula guilty of committing indeterminate acts of
corruption, Western corporate media made little to no mention of prosecutorial
misconduct, which was written about extensively in independent Brazilian media
and legal publications. Moro had broken the law on multiple occasions in his
zeal to put the former president behind bars. Using a legal
loophole dating back to the Inquisition that enabled him to both
oversee the investigation and rule on it, he ordered the Federal Police
to wiretap Lula’s defense lawyers. This enabled the prosecutors to map out
all possible moves by the defense and plan their reactions in advance. Moro
also illegally wiretapped President Dilma Rousseff, then illegally leaked
out-of-context audio to Brazil’s largest TV network on the eve of her impeachment
hearings. In 2017, US Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Blanco bragged
about informal communications with his friends in the Lava Jato task
force, which violates Brazilian law by bypassing security protocols.

There
was certainly enough information out there to suggest that Lula might be the
victim of a political witch hunt to keep him from becoming president. This is,
in fact, what the AFL-CIO, Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Bernie
Sanders and 29 Members of Congress were all saying at the time.
However, no shadow of a doubt was allowed to fall over the proceedings in Anglo
media. In the New Yorker (7/13/17), Alex Cuadros gushed that
Lula’s conviction was “the most important criminal conviction in Brazil’s
history.” And the week of Lula’s arrest, the Guardian (4/3/18)
erroneously claimed that his conviction was connected to an “R$88 million graft
scheme” involving Petrobras that Judge Moro had specifically explained in
his ruling was not the case.

Behind
bars and (illegally) barred from speaking to the press, Lula continued to run
for president. Three months after he was arrested, he still led all
election polls, with double the support of his nearest competitor. Then the UN
Human Rights Committee issued a ruling, legally binding according to both
international and Brazilian law, stating that Lula had the right to run
for president. But as in the April 5, 2018, Supreme Court ruling, the judiciary
decided to make an exception to the law, specifically to bar Lula from the
campaign. Less than one month before the elections, the PT party was forced to
provide a replacement candidate.

All
things considered, the electoral results were better than expected. The PT
party remained the largest party in Congress and became the
party with the most governors. Last minute candidate Fernando Haddad made it to
the final round and received 47 million votes, but it was not enough.

The Intercept‘s revelations (6/9/19)
of judicial collusion were mentioned in the Brazilian Supreme Court ruling that
ordered Lula da Silva’s release, but were often ignored in US media coverage of
his return to freedom.

Months
after Bolsonaro took office, the Intercept’s Glenn
Greenwald revealed thousands of hours of social media
conversations between Lava Jato prosecutors and Moro. They showed the
supposedly impartial judge giving instructions to the prosecutors, not only on
how to improve the accusations, but on how to conduct a media strategy to
commit character assassination against Lula. They exposed collusion with a
Supreme Court Justice to issue a gag order preventing Lula from speaking to the
press during the leadup to the 2018 presidential elections, in order to aid
Bolsonaro’s campaign. They showed Lava Jato prosecution task force leader
Delton Dallagnol praying to God that Bolsonaro would win the presidential
election. Most damning of all, perhaps, is the conversation conducted between
Dallagnol and the other prosecutors, only a few hours before the final trial,
revealing that they didn’t think they had any proof, but that Moro was
going to guarantee a conviction.

The
US Department of Justice announced in March 2019 that it was going to give
Dallagnol and his Lava Jato task force $682 million to open a privately
managed “anti-corruption” foundation in Curitiba. The money would come
from the $3.5 billion in fines that the DoJ and SEC collected in Lava
Jato’s process of bankrupting and dismantling Brazil’s largest
companies in the leadup to the 2016 legislative coup against
President Rousseff.

The
move was blocked by the Superior Justice Court, but it raised questions among
some US lawmakers about how deep the US government’s role went in Lava Jato. On
August 21, Rep. Hank Johnson (D.-Georgia) and 12 other members of
Congress delivered a letter to Attorney General William Barr
demanding answers to a series of questions about possible legal and ethical
violations committed by the DoJ during its partnership with Moro and Lava Jato.
One of the questions reads, “Did DoJ provide assistance with the collection or
analysis of evidence compiled by the Lava Jato Task Force and Judge Moro for
President Lula’s case?”

On
September 25, Rep. Raul Grijalva and 14 other members of Congress
introduced House Resolution 594, “expressing profound concern about
threats to human rights, the rule of law, democracy and the environment in
Brazil.” Moro is repeatedly criticized in the text of the resolution, which
mentions the Intercept leaks, and states that

Sérgio
Moro, the presiding judge in da Silva’s case, acted in a clearly biased manner
toward da Silva, violating his right to a fair and impartial judicial process
under Brazilian law.

One
might think that by now US corporate media would finally begin to question the
narrative that Lula is somehow guilty of corruption. Wouldn’t American readers
be interested in learning about the role their Justice Department played in
this process? Aren’t the leaked social media chats published by the Intercept relevant
to the story of Lula’s release, especially since they were mentioned in the
Brazilian Supreme Court ruling?

The New York Times (11/8/19)
waited until the 18th of 28 paragraphs to mention “questions about the fairness
of Mr. da Silva’s prosecution.”

Unfortunately,
since Lula’s release, none of the major corporate media outlets have mentioned
the US Department of Justice role in Lava Jato at all. Although a few papers
mentioned the Intercept revelations, they are reframed and
rendered less threatening to the narrative, presented in the context of
“raising doubts among some” about the investigation.

On
the day Lula was released, Bloomberg (11/8/19) ran an article
which does not mention illegal collusion between judge and prosecutors. It
states instead:

The
ex-president was convicted of corruption in 2017 and lost two appeals since
then, but he has not exhausted the entire process. He has repeatedly denied
wrongdoing and has said he’s victim of political persecution.

The Washington
Post’s first article (11/8/19) on Lula’s release also failed to mention the
corruption scandal which has enveloped Lava Jato, although it provided a link to
a previous article (6/17/19) on that subject.

In
two articles about Lula’s release, the BBC (11/9/19) likewise
ignored the illegal collusion between judge and prosecutors in Lava Jato.

On
the day Lula was released, the Guardian, whose Latin America editor
Tom Phillips wrote 22 articles normalizing Bolsonaro in October 2018
in the leadup to the elections, made the editorial decision to rerun
an AP article that makes no mention of the leaked social
media conversations. One day later, the Washington Post‘s Dom
Phillips (11/8/19), who was one of the biggest cheerleaders for
Lula’s political imprisonment in the international media, briefly mentioned
the Intercept revelations and Moro’s ethical problems in the
context of an article that misrepresented Lula’s conviction as being connected
to “money laundering,” and ended with an uncritical treatment of
other frivolous charges against the former president.

The New
York Times (11/8/19) mentioned the leaked audio messages, saying that
they “made clear, for instance, that Mr. Moro had actively advised prosecutors
on strategy in the case, conduct that legal analysts have called an ethical and
legal transgression,” then quoted Moro on the case and stated that he disputes
the idea that he acted improperly.

Despite
the evidence of Lula’s innocence and illegal persecution, with the cooperation
of the US DoJ, that removed him from the 2018 presidential elections,
establishment media cling to a false narrative that, while weakened by the
subsequent actions of current “Super Justice Minister” Moro, still attempts to
damage the public image of the most popular president in Brazilian history.

As
the smear campaign continues, it is important to remember that Lula represented
a social democratic national development project, in the tradition of what
Brazilians call desenvolvimentalismo, based on strategic control
over natural resources and their use to fund public services like health and
education, strong minimum wage policies and labor rights, increased access to
free public universities, and strong investment in scientific research. This is
the project that was dismantled after the 2016 coup, to the benefit of
corporations like Monsanto, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Boeing. History shows that
every Brazilian president who ever tried to implement desenvolvimentalista policies—from Getúlio
Vargas, Juscelino Kubitschek and Jango Goulart to Rousseff
and Lula—has been subjected to a coup, political imprisonment
or assassination, with perennial suspicion of US involvement. And as
we see corporate media working to normalize the military coup in Bolivia (FAIR.org, 11/11/19),
it is clear that this problem is not limited to Brazil.

Four Cuban officials
were also accused of demonstrating against a de facto regime headed by
Senator Jeanine Añez, who self-proclaimed president on Tuesday.

Independent journalists
who are covering protests in Bolivia were accused of carrying out
"sedition" by Communications Minister Roxana Lizarraga, who was
paradoxically appointed by a US-backed government that emerged from a coup
d'etat against the socialist President Evo Morales.

"Law will be fully
enforced against those journalists or pseudo-journalists who are seditious,
whether they are nationals or foreigners," Lizarraga said and took the
opportunity to blame Cuba and Venezuela for the ongoing social unrest in
Bolivia.

“They want to put us on
their knees,” she added and warned that the Interior Ministry already has a
list of the journalists who are stirring up resistance or rebellion against the
coup-born regime.

According to identity
documents to which international journalists had access, however, the detainees
are cooperating technicians who are part of the Cuban Medical Brigade.

Physician Ramon Emilio,
economist Idalberto Delgado and electromedical engineer Amparo Lourdes are
currently being held at the Police Operations Tactical Unit (UTOP) in La Paz.
The fourth detainee's identity is not yet known.

The Organization of American States (OAS) is a coup plotter and
must answer for its complicity in kidnappings, torture, and deaths of Bolivian
citizens, who are resisting and denouncing Bolivia's coup d'etat that was
executed with interference from the U.S. Enough of media censorship! The
United Nations should disseminate information and intervene.

Despite the blockade
that mainstream media are making to what is happening in the Andean
country, expressions of international solidarity with the Bolivian people are
multiplying.

In Mexico City, for
instance, human rights defenders and social activists on Friday will hold a
rally in front of the U.S. embassy in rejection of the coup d'etat, which
is being consummated under the auspices of the Organization of American States
(OAS).

"We are all invited
to denounce the U.S. empire blatant interference in this country,"
the rally organizers said and added that the Bolivians will keep a
stubborn resistance against the racist oligarchy.

Teresa Zubieta, the
Ombudsman's office delegate, holds that 23 people have
died amidst the coup d'etat.

Over the last 24 hours,
at least nine Bolivians have died as a result of repressive actions
carried out by the security forces that support the coup-based
government headed by Senator Jeanine Añez.

"23 people have
died since the coup. The most recent victims are four people shot
dead in La Paz and five in Sacaba," La Paz Ombudsman'
Office delegate Teresa Zubieta told teleSUR.

"They have killed
our brothers as if they were animals," Zubieta said and explained that
Añez's regime is generating "a setback of more than 30 years with
respect to the protection of people."

Judging by the
complaints filed before the Ombudsman's office, far-right paramilitary
groups have been activated to "repress and intimidate people even when
they are simply walking home from work."

Coup in Bolivia: The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
(IACHR) condemned the Sacaba massacre. Five dead and dozens injured by the
repression. After the murder of five protesters, the IACHR reminded the
self-proclaimed president of her "obligation to ensure the right to life
and physical integrity of those who protest peacefully" and condemned the
"disproportionate use of police and military force."

As a consequence of the
prevailing institutional chaos, however, the figures on human rights violations
vary constantly.

Until Nov. 14, for
example, the Ombudsman's Office maintained that 536 people had been
injured and 12 people killed in the midst of intense repression against the
people who resist in the streets.

On the other hand,
according to the international news agency EFE, the conflict in Bolivia has
left at least 18 dead and more than 500 injured since the presidential elections
held on October 20.

Despite the evidence on
violence against Bolivians, the governments of the United States, the United
Kingdom and Colombia recognized the regime of Jeanina Añez as their direct
interlocutor.

While that was
happening, however, the governments of Uruguay, China and Russia have joined
the voices that forcefully reject the coup in Bolivia.

Bolivia: repressive forces at the service of Jeanine Añez killed 7
people. Amid the pain, the people shout: "Añez, murderer!"

In the midst of the political
crisis, the Senate on Thursday elected the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS)
Senator Monica Cota as its new president.

She will replace Ariana
Salvatierra, who was forced to resign on the weekend in which
the right-wing politicians also managed to press for President
Evo Morales' resignation.

By electing a new
president, the Senate attempts to rebuild the normal functioning of democratic
institutions amid the persecution and repression which the self-proclaimed
president Añez is leading.

We
join thousands of organizations and millions of people across the globe
in condemning the Coup carried out against President Evo Morales of
Bolivia. To suggest that he voluntarily resigned ignores the demand
placed on him by the military, which, along with the police, had been
influenced by US intelligence services and aligned with the right wing
opposition.

President
Trump has lauded the Coup because it is a critical part of his
administration's efforts to overthrow progressive governments in Latin
America and force failing neoliberal economic measures on the masses
that have experienced some gains under the policies of the
progressives. In the case of Bolivia, wages and social benefits
improved and as the full name of the country suggests -the Plurinational
State of Bolivia- the indigenous population was recognized and brought
into the political life of the country. Evo is not only a socialist but
also the first Indigenous President of the majority Indigenous nation.
Already the Coup backers are physically attacking the Morales'
supporters and destroying their cultural symbols.

Last week nearly 1,400 activists from 87
countries gathered in Havana, Cuba to denounce the escalation of
economic attacks on Cuba but also the sanctions against Venezuela and
Zimbabwe. The US supported plot by the Bolivian right was unfolding at
the time and the body took note of this in the final declaration: "Congratulate the people of
the Plurinational State of Bolivia for their electoral victory and
President Evo Morales Ayma on his re-election, as a result of measures
benefitting the people and economic growth. Likewise, we denounce the attempts at coup d'états
and destabilization unleashed by sectors of the opposition, instigated
by the United States, against peace and public safety in
Bolivia."

As this all plays out, the working class
and popular masses in Chile continue their protests against harsh
austerity measures and former Brazilian President Lula da Silva has
been released from prison after 18 months based on politically
motivated and bogus charges and promises to continue the fight against
the Fascist Bolsanoro government. This is all a part of the resistance
to the 21st century version of the Monroe Doctrine that guided US policies in the
past. There have been an estimated 56 US interventions in Latin America
since the late 1800's.

The Trump regime although embroiled in
defensive struggles at home is not asleep in Latin America and as long
as they remain in power African descendants and Indigenous people will
be vulnerable to the exploitation and violence of the elites and
racists supported by the US Empire. It is imperative that we align
ourselves with the anti-imperialist movement in the hemisphere to
defend the gains and make new advances in the struggles for social
transformation and sovereignty.

Commanders of Bolivia’s military and police
helped plot the coup and guaranteed its success. Before they were educated
for insurrection through the US military’s notorious School of the Americas
and FBI training programs.

This week on
counterspin: The Washington Post doesn't want you to be
confused, so they headlined their editorial, "Bolivia Is in
Danger of Slipping Into Anarchy. It’s Evo Morales’s Fault." Elite US
media, you understand, are deeply invested in the well-being of Bolivia's
people, who are in uproar after a coup ousting Morales, over charges of
irregularities in the recent election that appear to have no evidential
grounding—nor, in media's view, to require any. Back in 2006, US media
were counseling Morales that
policies like nationalizing the country's gas industry were popular but
"not the answer to Bolivia’s problems.” Their preferred answer,
judging by today's coverage, is celebrating the
extra-legal pushout of the country's first indigenous president, and
welcoming the self-declared leadership of a legislator who has tweeted that
she "dream[s] of a Bolivia free of satanic indigenous rites."
That's the topsy-turvy world of elite US media's "concerned"
foreign policy. Which is why we'll look for a different view from Alex
Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and
Policy Research.

The Bolivian tragedy
eloquently teaches several lessons that our peoples and popular social and
political forces must learn and record in their consciences forever. Here, a
brief enumeration, on the fly, and as a prelude to a more detailed treatment in
the future.